Zino

The first name of the cigar merchant

Zino Davidoff was born in 1906 in the Russian Empire, in Ukraine, and arrived in Geneva in 1911 with his family, who were fleeing the pogroms. His father opened a tobacco shop on rue du Marché; the son would turn it into one of the best-known cigar houses in the world.

He invented the desktop cigar humidor, founded the Zino Davidoff group in 1980 with Ernst Schneider, and died in Geneva in 1994. The house's first perfume was released in 1984; Zino followed two years later, during his lifetime.

Two signatures, perhaps three

Auparfum and Wikiparfum credit the formula to two noses, Michel Almairac and Pierre Bourdon. Most online listings mention only the first, which has ended up making Almairac the sole author of the perfume.

Almairac is from Grasse, trained at Roure before Takasago, Créations Aromatiques, Drom, and Robertet since 1998; he is behind Fahrenheit and Gucci pour Homme. Wikiparfum adds a third name, Jean-François Latty, which no other source repeats.

A cigar box

The name set a register, and the formula holds it. Jeanne Doré, who reviewed the perfume for Auparfum, describes an unremarkable aromatic opening, mint, lavender and sage, which suggests just another fougère.

It is after a few minutes that the perfume shifts. A warm, humid bitterness rises, that of a cigar box, carried by cistus, costus, patchouli and vanilla, held by sandalwood and cedar.

Costus does the rest: this somewhat animalic raw material, bordering on unpleasant, gives the base the smell of moist skin. It explains why Zino still divides opinion, forty years after its release.

Before Cool Water

Two years after Zino, Davidoff released Cool Water and took the exact opposite direction: fresh, clean, marine. It is that fragrance that made the house's fortune in perfumery, and it is the one people cite when naming the brand.

Zino remains the catalogue's dark masculine, strongly marked by its decade. Jeanne Doré nonetheless judges it less dated than Kouros, whose formula Pierre Bourdon had signed five years earlier.